Re: [PATCH v1] ringbuffer: Don't choose the process with adj equal OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MIN

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Tue 10-04-18 08:23:16, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Apr 2018 12:49:02 +0200
> Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> wrote:
> 
> > But you do realize that what you are proposing is by no means any safer,
> > don't you? The memory allocated for the ring buffer is _not_ accounted
> > to any process and as such it is not considered by the oom killer when
> > picking up an oom victim so you are quite likely to pick up an innocent
> > process to be killed. So basically you are risking an allocation runaway
> > completely hidden from the OOM killer. Now, the downside of the patch is
> > that the OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MIN task might get killed which is something that
> > shouldn't happen because it is a contract. I would call this an
> > unsolvable problem and a inherent broken design of the oom disabled
> > task. So far I haven't heard a single _argument_ why supporting such a
> > weird cornercase is desirable when your application can trivial do
> > 
> > fork(); set_oom_score_adj(); exec("echo $VAR > $RINGBUFFER_FILE")
> 
> We could do this as a compromise:
> 
> diff --git a/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c b/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c
> index c9cb9767d49b..40c2e0a56c51 100644
> --- a/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c
> +++ b/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c
> @@ -1185,6 +1185,12 @@ static int __rb_allocate_pages(long nr_pages, struct list_head *pages, int cpu)
>  	 */
>  	mflags = GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL;
>  
> +	/* If we can't OOM this task, then only allocate without reclaim */
> +	if (unlikely(current->signal->oom_score_adj == OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MIN)) {
> +		mflags = GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NORETRY;
> +		user_thread = false; /* do not set oom_origin */
> +	}
> +
>  	/*
>  	 * If a user thread allocates too much, and si_mem_available()
>  	 * reports there's enough memory, even though there is not.
> 
> This way, if one sets OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MIN, then we wont set oom_origin
> for the task, but we also wont try hard to allocate memory if there is
> nothing immediately available.

I would rather that the code outside of MM not touch implementation
details like OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MIN. It is really hard to get rid of abusers
whenever you try to change something in MM then. Especially when the
usecase is quite dubious.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs